Why the Nürburgring?

It's a safe bet that a generation ago few North American auto enthusiasts, much less the general public, had ever heard of the Nürburgring. But thanks to advertising from Detroit automakers eager to give their wares some old world panache, the venerable German track is almost a household word. Most of us even know the classic track by it's more accurate Nordschleife moniker.

So, how did the Nürburgring go from cult following to mainstream? Or, in so many words, why do automakers, especially from this side of the pond, make the trip to test there?

The answer is, aside from being one ocean and half a continent away, the Nürburgring is cost effective. For starters, it's available as a test track and has been since its 1925 opening year. And for European car makers it's been remarkably convenient. Laid out like a typical road of its time, despite being updated occasionally, the Nürburgring is relatively narrow and real-world compared to today's sanitized tracks.

But above all is the Nordscheife's 12.9 mile length. A single lap contains a top speed straight, 154 turns and hundreds of feet of elevation change. Some of it is fairly smooth, some of it bumpy. There are heaves and humps, asphalt and concrete surfaces, bowls and flat turns, curbs and blind crests. In one lap the engineers can subject their test mules to a huge range of conditions.

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To get the same range elsewhere typically involves traveling to and renting three different tracks say the engineers. And that's expensive say the accountants.

Naturally, shipping a test car from Detroit to Germany, along with the engineers, test equipment and spares is no off-hand exercise. But once there the testing is intense and time effective.

Curiously, while fast laps at the `ring are the stuff of enthusiast bragging sessions, the engineers typically see setting a fast Nürburgring lap as a necessary evil, an interruption of good testing time. That's because the sliderule types normally concentrate on one section of the famed Nürburgring lap and rarely run a full lap all-out.

Finally, testing street cars at race tracks has become the norm. Perhaps ten years ago this wasn't the case, as instrumented test drives on the street were enough to uncover what the engineers were looking for. But today's roads are too crowded, and the cars too fast to do much more than driveability and durability testing.

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